The recent report of the Inquiry into Chronic Disease Prevention and Management in Primary Health Care by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health has been somewhat overshadowed by the current election campaign.
One of the terms of reference of the Inquiry required the Committee to consider the role of private health insurers in chronic disease prevention and management. (more…)
In our brave new world of digital gadgetry, awash with empty slogans and blighted by ever-shrinking attention spans, is there any prospect of rational political debate in this election? A pervading mood of paranoia seems to be the new norm. Who do the Liberals hate most in this campaign? Bill Shorten? The unions? The Greens? The “left-wing media”? In varying degrees they detest them all. But no organisation arouses deeper contempt in conservative breasts – greater fear and loathing, more paranoid suspicion and distrust – than the ABC.
Why should this be so? For many conservatives, the national broadcaster is a hotbed of radical activism, staffed and managed by closet lefties and loony, latte-sipping ideologues opposed to traditional values. Forever on the lookout for examples of ABC bias and irresponsibility, conservatives and their media allies have little difficulty in discovering new ones. The ABC’s latest offence was its wilful refusal to televise the recent leaders’ debate organised by SkyNews (part-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp). How bad was that? By common consent, the debate was pretty boring, but every commentator (certainly all those in the Murdoch stable) pronounced Malcolm the winner. The ABC, aware of Turnbull’s formidable skills as a debater and wordsmith, had no wish to join SkyNews in promoting his image to voters.
A few days later, talking to some of my Liberal friends (and yes, I have quite a few), I was surprised to learn of another ABC conspiracy. Have you noticed that their top-rated discussion programs – Lateline, The Insiders and the deeply detested Q&A – are deliberately giving prominence to independent candidates to help them capture seats from conservatives? Jacqui Lambie, Nick Xenophon, Tony Windsor and their ilk are getting far more exposure than they deserve. No, I’m serious. As an old journalist myself, I point out that Lambie is a highly amusing character, that Xenophon is a force to be reckoned with in South Australia, and that the much-despised Tony Windsor, despite his scandalous alliance with Julia Gillard in 2010, is an honourable man. All, surely, deserve some coverage at election time. But not if the Libs have their way. When Michelle Guthrie took over as the ABC’s managing director last month, Liberal senator Eric Abetz demanded that she immediately “end the lefty love-in”. (And if you’ve ever wondered why those carefully balanced audiences at Q&A broadcasts display obvious left-wing bias, it’s because Greens and lefties turn up in droves at the studio and declare themselves Liberal voters to gain admission.)
For seasoned ABC watchers, all this has a familiar ring. The organisation has long been accused of left-wing bias, and there was time in the 1970s when the charge had some validity. In those days, the ABC’s special projects department was run by Allan Ashbolt, a left-wing radical and regular contributor to the British socialist journal New Statesman. He also wrote occasional book reviews for me when I was literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. I remember him as a fine writer and something of a radical spirit. But he wasn’t nearly radical enough for the Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen, who declared that Ashbolt’s Lateline program (then a radio show) embodied the values of “bourgeois liberalism.”
Stung by this rebuke, Ashbolt insisted that Lateline reflected the “intellectual concerns of its producers, whose briefs and passions spanned a fairly wide spectrum of thinking from the centre to the left of politics.” No wonder conservatives were angry! The poet Douglas Stewart, reviewing a memoir Ashbolt wrote in 1974, professed his amazement that “for ten mighty years from 1963 to 1973 Ashbolt was regularly sacked, demoted, reprimanded, transferred, promoted, stood in the corner, hanged, drawn and quartered at least once a week for his controversial current affairs programs…” Ken Inglis, in his definitive history of the ABC, wondered why Ashbolt stayed so long at an organisation he had publicly characterised as an “ideological arm of the capitalist state”.
I suspect that prevailing conservative attitudes to the ABC had their origins in those events. But the political climate has changed in 40 years, and so, in many ways, has the ABC. Numerous independent reviews and internal audits have found no evidence of systemic political bias, though conservative critics continue to think otherwise. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald when Mark Scott retired as managing director in April this year, Gerard Henderson lamented that after ten years with Scott at the helm the ABC had “not one conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its prominent TV, radio or online outlets.” Gerard didn’t tell us which conservatives he would have chosen; nor did he name the non-conservative producers and presenters allegedly running the show. He couldn’t name them because they don’t exist – unless we accept that anyone sitting a little to the left of the far right is some kind of Marxist. What the ABC can rightly boast of are some of the best and fairest presenters in the country, and some of the best and toughest interviewers – the likes of Leigh Sales, Emma Albirici and Chris Uhlmann – who can dish it out equally to politicians of all persuasions.
Even so, the culture wars show sign of abating. The last big blow-up was in 2013, when the ABC broke the story that Australia’s spy agencies had been monitoring the phones of the then Indonesian president and his wife. Worse, according to outraged Tories, the ABC had joined forces with the left-wing Guardian Australia to promote the story, based on leaked documents from the notorious Edward Snowden. By any journalistic test, Australia’s phone-tapping operation was a big story, and no self-respecting media organisation would have ignored it. But Malcolm Turnbull, then communications minister, denounced the ABC for its bad judgment and Liberal senator Cory Bernardi branded the corporation a “taxpayer-funded behemoth.” According to political journalist Michelle Grattan, “critics have seized on the ABC’s action as an opportunity to denounce what they see as its view of the world.” The Australian’s Greg Sheridan wrote that the ABC would “go to any lengths to prosecute its endless war against the dark forces of conservative Australia.”
For 23 years until Gough Whitlam’s election in 1972, the dark forces of conservative Australia were kept in check. Conservative governments in those years appointed every ABC board member under the chairmanship of such venerable establishment figures as Sir Richard Boyer and Sir James Darling. Whitlam, in typically provocative mood, replaced the entire board with Labor supporters. Then, in 1975, it was Malcolm Fraser’s turn, and Whitlam’s chairman, Sir Richard Downing, was replaced by Sir Henry Bland. But as politicians on both sides have often found, boards and directors at the ABC have little practical control over day-to-day programming. The ABC carried on pretty much as it
always had. Finally, in what conservatives hailed as a master-stroke, Fraser installed the late Professor Dame Leonie Kramer as chair, confident that her strong personality and well-known right-wing views would reshape the lefty culture. But Kramer, in her short tenure, proved a staunch defender of the ABC’s independence, declaring herself (in the words of a Sydney Morning Herald obituary-writer) a “guardian of the highest standards of broadcasting.”
John Howard rode to the rescue in 1996. A string of right-wing appointments included the Victorian Liberal Party bigshot Michael Kroger, conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen, and Keith Windshuttle, then editor of Quadrant. As chairman Howard installed his friend Donald McDonald, who was confidently expected to end the “lefty love-in” once and for all. But McDonald, too, proved to be his own man, standing up for the ABC against political pressure and interference from all sides. One thing he couldn’t stop was Howard’s abolition of the staff-elected director’s position – a move that many saw as a gesture of revenge for the ABC’s ongoing intransigence. (The staff-elected director was restored by the Rudd government in 2007.)
How will the ABC fare under Malcolm Turnbull? Perhaps it’s too early to say. Turnbull was minister for communications when the Abbott government cut $254 million from the ABC’s budget in 2014 in breach of an election promise. Malcolm can always be relied upon to make the right soothing noises at the right time, but if Abbott’s so-called “budget emergency” ever materialises he may be tempted to cut some more.
After years fending off assorted threats and confected outrage from the right, I expect the ABC will continue doing what it does best – providing a lively and generally well-balanced news coverage and numerous forums for sophisticated political debate. It has some of the best political commentators and election analysts in the business. Above all, to the great consternation of conservatives, it enjoys solid middle-class support. The Friends of the ABC and the so-called doctors’ wives have always been ready to rally to the cause. Their support, I believe, will deter any future conservative government from scaling back or selling off the corporation. Malcolm Turnbull may have patched up his row with Alan Jones, doyen of Sydney radio shock-jocks, at least for the duration of the present campaign, but at heart , I think, he’s an ABC true believer. We must hope so.
Evan Williams is a former newspaper editor and Walkley Award-winning journalist. He wrote speeches for Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and a succession of NSW premiers. He headed the NSW Government’s cultural sector from 1977 to 2001, and for 33 years wrote regular film reviews for The Australian. He is a Member of the Order of Australia.
An opinion piece in yesterday’s Financial Review by James Laurenceson dismisses union concerns on ChAFTA – ‘Don’t believe Chinese worker Free Trade Agreement scaremongering’, 9/6/16. It warrants a response.
Laurenceson’s claims do not stand up to scrutiny. They concern firstly the Chinese installers on the 400 visas, the subject of John Menadue’s blog below.
Laurenceson fails to mention the fundamental point that ChAFTA granted LMT-exempt entry to Chinese workers in this ‘installers and servicers’ category, for the first time in our FTA history. (more…)
An interesting aspect of the Coalition’s suggestion that the ALP had committed to restoring $19 billion to the Australian Aid budget is that pro-Aid campaigners themselves had previously only mentioned $11 billion of cuts. That is, they intentionally inflate the level of cuts to more powerfully demonstrate their commitment to balancing the budget on the backs of the world’s poor. While politicians and Australia’s humanitarians war over the dollar figures in the forward estimates there’s another battle that’s less about our national budget and more about our national character – a war on generosity. (more…)
the news from Manus and Nauru gets worse by the day. Inhumanity is imposed in our name.
Nauru and Manus are unsustainable. I have yet to meet anyone who will admit that what is happening is right or defensible.
See link below ‘Protection denied, abuse condoned; women on Nauru at risk’. This searing story is authored by Wendy Bacon, Pamela Curr, Carmen Lawrence, Julie Macken and Claire O’Connor. Please pass on to friends and colleagues.
If once upon a time my enemy’s enemy was my friend, then bizarrely enough it now seems that my friend’s enemy is my friend. Confused? Me too. I think I liked it better the way it was before.
Over the weekend, we had the coalition, Labor and that well known bastion of social good, the Australian Hotels Association (AHA), united against … ISIS? Donald Trump?
No. Nick Xenophon. (more…)
In the 1890s, Texan cowboy Clark Stanley began marketing a new product at medicine shows.
A man who could kill rattlesnakes with his bare hands, Stanley promised people that his rattlesnake extract would bring relief from rheumatism, sprains, swelling, back pain and toothache.
It wasn’t until 1917 that Stanley’s operation was finally shut down, with a court finding that the product not only didn’t provide a cure; it wasn’t even made from snakes. And so the term ‘snake oil’ was born.
I’ve been thinking about Clark Stanley since budget night, as Coalition leaders have boldly claimed that a cut to company taxes will whiten your teeth, improve your car’s fuel efficiency and make your chooks lay more eggs.
Yet just as Stanley didn’t want people to read his recipe, so too I’m not sure the Coalition wanted Australians to delve into the Treasury report that underpins their big business tax cut.
Titled ‘Analysis of the Long Term Effects of a Company Tax Cut’, the Treasury analysis makes clear how a company tax cut is supposed to help households. You’ll have to bear with me, because this one’s longer than a scrub python.
Since Australia has dividend imputation, domestic shareholders don’t benefit much. As the Grattan Institute’s John Daley has pointed out, local shareholders only gain if profits are reinvested rather than paid out. However, our firms tend to have pretty high payout ratios, so this turns out to be a modest impact in practice.
So in the first instance, most of the gains go overseas. There will even be some cases in which US-based multinationals repatriate their profits, paying the difference between their higher rate and our lower one.
In such cases, an Australian company tax cut simply flows into the coffers of the US Treasury – meaning that some of the reduced revenue from an Australian company tax cut would be available to be spent by the successors to President Clinton or President Trump.
Having enjoyed the first-round benefits of a company tax cut, the Treasury report then argues that foreign shareholders will respond to higher after-tax profits on their Australian investments. The theory goes that overseas shareholders then invest less in other countries, and more in Australia. More investment means greater demand for land and labour. So in the long run, land prices and wages are supposed to rise.
As Keynes famously put it, we are all dead in the long run – so it’s worth asking how long we’re talking about. And the answer, typically, is 7 to 10 years. Since Malcolm Turnbull’s tax cut only reduces the tax rate on big business to 25% on 1 July 2026, this means that the Coalition is promising to raise wages somewhere between 2033 and 2035. At that point, Turnbull would be in his late-70s, and well on the way to becoming the longest-serving Prime Minister since Robert Menzies.
And how big will the gains be? It depends how you pay for the company tax cut. The Treasury report suggests that tax cuts could be funded by a nationwide land tax, higher personal income taxes, or lower government spending. Since that the federal government last levied land taxes in 1952, that option can be safely set aside as hypothetical.
So that leaves a company tax cut funded by less spending or higher income taxes. According to Treasury, if a big business tax cut from 30% to 25% is funded by lower spending, the boost to households is 0.7%.
But for every ladder in the Treasury report, there’s a snake. In this case, the modelling is based on the idea that none of us get any direct benefits from roads, schools and hospitals.
As the authors note:
‘It is important to recall that the modelling of government spending is assumed not to affect directly the welfare of households. While this is a common modelling assumption it ignores the fact that government spending provides goods and services that would otherwise not be provided by the market sector; households derive direct utility from government spending; and infrastructure spending can improve market sector productivity.
This suggests the results reported in this section overstate the benefits of this funding alternative.’
In other words, Treasury knows that the benefit to households of a company tax cut funded by less government spending will be smaller than 0.7% – they just can’t say how much smaller.
One more reason not to rely too strongly on the idea that we can get a big boost out of a company tax cut funded by lower government spending. Since the Abbott-Turnbull government won office, spending as a share of the economy has gone up, not down.
So that leaves as the most likely option a company tax cut for big business that’s funded by higher personal income taxes. According to the Treasury report, the benefit to households is 0.1%.
How big is a gain in household incomes of 0.1%? To test this, I pulled up data back to the early-1970s, to see how household income (specifically, real net national disposable income per person) has grown. It turns out that over this period, household income has risen by an average of 0.1% each month. So Treasury’s most likely scenario is that a company tax cut delivers an extra month of household income growth.
To see how risible this is, you need to recognise how poorly the economy has been performing for middle-income households since 2013. Living standards are down 4%. Wage growth is at a 30-year low. The home ownership rate is at a 60-year low. Inequality is at a 75-year high, with the top 1% having doubled their share of income in the past generation.
In an environment like that, you might expect that supporting average households would be a national priority. And yet Malcolm Turnbull’s first budget contained precious little for middle Australia. One of its most expensive measures was a tax cut for those earning over $180,000. Ninety-four percent of that tax cut will go to the top 1%.
While the top 1% get their tax cut the day before the election, the benefits of Turnbull’s company tax cut will trickle down very slowly… if at all.
For all the hype, Treasury’s own modelling suggests that the Coalition’s company tax cut will deliver one more month’s growth – in the 2030s. Even the great snake oil salesman Clark Stanley couldn’t sell that as a recipe for ‘jobs and growth’.
Andrew Leigh is the Shadow Assistant Treasurer.
This piece originally ran in Business Insider Australia.
This weekend, hundreds of people will make the pilgrimage to the small town of Bingara on the NSW North West slopes and plains, for the annual commemoration of the Myall Creek Massacre.
The memorial site, just out on the Delungra Road, marks the site of the massacre of 28 unarmed women, children and old men that occurred there on June 10, 1838. This is a place where terrible things occurred, a place shunned and avoided by locals, especially Aboriginal people, for over 150 years. (more…)
It is timely as the federal election approaches to consider whether all Australians are getting the healthcare they need. Approximately 30 per cent of Australians live in rural and remote areas.
Arguably they do not get a ‘fair go’ in relation to their healthcare compared to the rest of us.
Rural and remote Australians are disadvantaged by social circumstances that influence their health status and ripen them for avoidable chronic disease when compared to counterparts in Australia’s major cities. (more…)
A looming decision on weekend penalty rates presents problems for both major parties in the lead-up to Australia’s federal election. The Fair Work Commission seems likely to hand down its decision in the controversial case soon after the federal election.
Nobody knows what the commission’s decision on penalty rates in the retail and hospitality industries will be. There seem to be more tea-leaf readers predicting it will cut Sunday penalty rates to match Saturday rates than who think it will make no changes.
If so, employer organisations would be happy, but many retail employees will be worse off. Pressure would grow for cuts to penalty rates elsewhere.
The commission president’s request for submissions on whether some employees should be given a right to refuse to work on Sundays, perhaps as a trade-off, has added to the confidence of the former group of tea-leaf readers. (more…)
That Asian-Australians are making a substantial contribution to the Australian economy is a fact that can no longer be contested. This contribution is of enormous significance, especially as Australia seeks to become integrated into the regional economy. (more…)
Political “outsider” Kaitlin Walsh, self-proclaimed “ordinary person”, rakes over the pallid entrails of our body politic. And considers what might shut Mathias Cormann up. (more…)
Climate change policy has been a noticeable absentee from political debate in the current Australian federal election campaign. Recent news reports, however, suggest this silence masks secret bipartisanship on the need for an emissions trading scheme – or ETS – to help bring down Australian’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Labor’s commitment to introduce an ETS if elected in July is well-known: the party has in fact pledged to establish two such schemes – a specific ETS for the electricity sector and a wider economy ETS with emissions caps set in line with Australia’s international climate change commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and recent Paris Agreement. But the Coalition has steadfastly opposed any kind of ‘carbon price’. It repealed the Gillard government’s Clean Energy legislation for a carbon tax and ETS, and replaced it with the Direct Action policy which channels government funding to emissions-reducing projects. Environment Minister Hunt has also repeatedly rejected the idea that the Coalition government plans to introduce an ETS. So why are some in the media claiming that the Turnbull government is introducing an ETS by stealth? (more…)
Many of us have good reason for thinking that the state of our race relations is under challenge. We frequently see stories about people being racially vilified on public transport, and our recent public debates are punctuated by controversies about race.
We know racism is a reality in contemporary Australian society. About 20 per cent of Australians say they have experienced racial or religious discrimination of some kind. About 11 per cent say they have been excluded from social activities or the workplace because of their race. About 5 per cent say they’ve been physically assaulted because of their racial background. (more…)
If you want to see Chasing Asylum, Eva Orner’s brilliant new Australian documentary, my advice is to hurry along. At last count it was showing on just two screens in Sydney, and when I went along to the Dendy in Newtown on a recent Sunday afternoon – usually a good time for ticket sales – I was directed upstairs to a little cinema at the end of a long corridor to find the place half full. The ads are promoting it as “The film the Australian Government doesn’t want you to see” – and that I can believe. But does anyone want us to see it? Not the distributors – there’s barely a mention in the ads. Not, apparently, the ABC or SBS, who should be seizing it with both hands for prime-time screening during the election campaign. Perhaps that’s the problem – the film is politically explosive, and everyone seems to be running scared, including, of course, our political masters. (more…)
Compassion distinguishes human presence from all other presence on the earth. The human mind is one of the most gracious gifts of creation. The human mind is the place where nature gathers at its most intense and at its most intimate. The human being is an in-between presence, belonging neither fully to the earth from which she has come, nor to the heavens toward which her mind and spirit aim. In a sense, the human being is the loneliest creature in creation. Paradoxically, the human being also has the greatest possibility for intimacy. I link compassion immediately with intimacy. Compassion is the ability to vitally imagine what it is like to be an other, the force that makes a bridge from the island of one individuality to the island of the other. It is an ability to step outside your own perspective, limitations and ego, and become attentive in a vulnerable, encouraging, critical, and creative way with the hidden world of another person. (more…)
With a federal election looming, Australia’s top mandarins will once again be turning their minds to the incoming government briefs, the so-called blue book if the Coalition is returned and the red book if Labor is elected.
High on the agenda will be the organisation of the bureaucracy and it won’t get any trickier than climate change.
A question for an incoming government will be whether to re-establish a Department of Climate Change?
And if not, what should be done? (more…)
In the first week of Malcolm Turnbull’s interminable election campaign, the Murdoch press surprised its readers by advocating support for Labor. How’s that again? Had Rupert had a change of heart? Well, not exactly. But it certainly looked that way when his Sydney tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, under the headline “Save Our Albo”, urged voters in Anthony Albanese’s suburban Sydney seat to keep Albo in the job. It turned out that the Greens – an even greater threat to civilisation than the ALP – were threatening to unseat Albo in a preference deal with the Liberals. Luckily this dire plot was exposed in time. (more…)
Today, President Obama is visiting Hiroshima. He will be the first US President to do so since the bombing in 1945. He said that he will not be apologising for the dropping of the bomb and will not try and second-guess President Harry Truman’s decision.
The widely accepted moral justification for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they brought a quick end to the war which if continued would result in more widespread deaths and destruction.
There is an argument that what the Japanese military feared most of all was not the bombing of civilians but the threat of Soviet occupation and perhaps partition of Japan. (more…)
John Thompson reminds us of the total lack of transparency in fees charged by doctors in Australia. Surgeon’s report shows the ineffectiveness of private health insurers to control health costs Posted on 07/05/2016 by John Menadue
So can we dissect this further. What is in a medical fee – well may you ask. When you go to your doctor you may see a fees schedule on the reception desk – or you may have received a letter from the receptionist / practice manager indicating that you will be responsible for certain fees over and above what you will get back from Medicare and ( possibily ) your Private Health Scheme . It is not unusual to be asked to pay something in advance before an appointment ( usually for a procedure – endoscopy ) is even made . Even lawyers don’t make you do that- do they . So there are at least three fees- what the Government pays the doctor – the Medicare fee , then there is the AMA rate – why this is different does not seem to be based on any scientific evidence , and then there is what the doctor actually charges you . Again not based on anything but what the doctor feels the market will support – and it usually does because effectively you have no choice .Do you ask for a second opinion ? do you have a discussion about the fee and why it is so much higher than the Medicare rebate or the AMA fee- when this person is going to put a new hip into you next week or open up your belly – I don’t think so . (more…)
The Paris Metro station of Bir Hakeim, not far from the Eiffel Tower, serves both the Australian Embassy and a monument that was erected in 1994 to commemorate the mass round-up of Jews, brought to the Velodrome d’hiver (an indoor cycle track known as the Vel d’hiv) which formerly occupied the site. The Australian Embassy in Paris is built on railway yards across from that Vel d’Hiv site. (more…)
The National Broadband Network (NBN) was meant to be a nation building project that positioned Australia as a leader in the global digital economy, but it has become a political football and as every day passes, Australia’s future prospects in the global digital economy are diminishing. (more…)
Women Religious welcome any development in Church that responds to women’s repeated call to have an equal share in the decision-making. Pope Francis’s proposal to set up a Commission to study the possibility of having women deacons, while not yet a decision to change a structure, is offering Catholic women a frisson of promise. (more…)
In this article, John Keane speaks of the slow death of social democracy but suggests that there may be possibilities that social democracy could embrace Green movements, intellectuals and parties that have common interests. See extracts from article below and link to the full article in The Conversation. (more…)
2016 marks seven years for the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education’s (FARE) Annual Alcohol Poll (conducted by Galaxy Research), and we continue to see Australia’s concern about the negative impacts alcohol has on the community. (more…)
Here is that rarest of cinematic pleasures – a fine story, beautifully told, acted to perfection by a first-rate cast, with a screenplay consisting mainly of intelligent conversation between adults of mature years, and with no recourse to car chases, explosions or gratuitous four-letter words. And with all of coming in at a little over an hour-and-a-half, it isn’t a moment too long. I can recommend The Man Who Knew Infinity, a British film written and directed by Matthew Brown, to cinemagoers of all ages as a necessary antidote to the likes of X-Men: Apocalypse and Captain America: Civil War (in 3D). (more…)
Prime Minister Turnbull announced the Australia-Singapore ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’ (CSP) on 6 May last, just a few days before he called the 2 July election.
Cynics will suspect the timing and also see the Singapore announcement as something of a consolation prize. The much bigger FTA fish for the Turnbull government was the elusive agreement with India. This was originally promised by the end of 2015 but Special Trade Envoy Mr Robb this week said only that a deal is now possible around mid-2016. (more…)
There is much political rhetoric spouted by both sides of Australian politics when it comes to economic management and the truth generally lies somewhere in between the myths and the half-truths. To make matters even worse, so-called economic experts from the financial and business sectors, shock jocks and news media outlets tend to centre discussion narrowly on surpluses, deficits and government debt taken out of any meaningful, economic context. The language or terms used in the news and in political debate, often gives an inaccurate or incorrect picture of what is really happening. The political pundits and the commentariat tend to give the impression that the process of preparing budgets and guiding an economy to prosperity is a simple, straightforward process and only requires a good measure of common sense. (more…)
At the Australia India Business Council forum in Sydney earlier this week, Indian diplomats wondered why Australian businesses lacked enthusiasm about engaging with an economy that is destined to become the world’s third largest within the next two decades. (more…)
Peter Dutton now makes no distinction between asylum seekers and refugees who come through regular or irregular channels. He now demonises all refugees. John Menadue.
It has been an article of faith for the Coalition that “real” refugees from UNHCR camps dotted around the globe deserve our compassionate support while the “illegal” asylum seekers who try to arrive by boat are little more than cashed up opportunists who deserve to be exiled in remote camps; object lessons to other would-be intruders. (more…)